Dominik Mersch Gallery is pleased to present the Dominik Mersch Gallery Curator Award 2016, supporting aspiring and emerging curators. The award invites curators to explore their own perceptions and expertise in response to the brief provided by DMG. The aim is to give the curators of the future a platform for their early work and the opportunity to experience first-hand the realities of curating and realising an exhibition in a commercial gallery setting. Entries are encouraged to explore the gallery’s existing idiosyncratic themes while expressing their unique narrative style. The 2016 winning curator Chloe Wolifson presents her exhibition, ’tensions/transla+ons/ transi+ons’ ’.
Wolifson’s exhibition ‘tensions/translations/transitions’ will bring together work by several artists employing physical and psychological markers and layers to evoke the tensions, translations and transitions occurring in our relationships with space and place. In bringing together these works Wolifson questions if perhaps new or unexpected tensions, translations or transitions will emerge to the viewer. Chloé Wolifson is an independent arts writer who has contributed to online & print publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly, Catalyst by Art Stage Singapore, Photofile, & Vault. Wolifson has curated exhibitions & public programs at Carriageworks, Verge Gallery, The Bearded Tit, Breezeblock, & SLOT. She recently completed a two-year tenure on the board of Runway Australian Experimental Art.
Jon Cattapan Jon Cattapan is an extensively exhibited visual artist who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He first began exhibiting in 1979 and his works deal primarily with ways of representing urban topographies and narratives. He is known for panoramic layered city vistas and figurative groupings and has a long held preoccupation for the way human beings negotiate territories. Within his paintings, drawings and prints we see influences of contemporary global culture and recent history that range from science fiction and film through to urban social debates. His extensive travels in Asia and living in cities such as New York, London and Venice have deeply influenced his practice. Cattapan’s work has been accorded many accolades.
Janet Laurence Exploring notions of art, science, imagination, memory, and loss, Janet Laurence’s practice examines the interconnection of life forms and ecologies and observes the impact that humans have on the threatened, natural world. Laurence’s work addresses our relationship to nature through both site specific and gallery works. Experimenting with and working in varying mediums, Laurence continues to create immersive environments that navigate the interconnections between all living forms. Her practice has sustained organic qualities and a sense of transience, occupying the liminal zones, or places where art, science, imagination and memory converge.
Anna McMahon Anna McMahon is an artist and curator. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) in 2010, a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Sydney in 2011 and a Master of Fine Arts at SCA in 2015. She is a 2015/2016 Co-Director at Firstdraft Gallery Sydney, and a resident artist at Parramatta Artist Studios in 2016. She was the 2016 recipient of the Dominik Mersch Gallery Award. McMahon also collaborates with fellow artist Kate Beckingham as OK YEAH COOL GREAT. She has shown nationally and internationally in solo, group and curatorial projects in various galleries including Open Source Gallery (NY), Raygun (QLD), MOP Projects (NSW), Wellington St Projects (NSW), Metro Arts (QLD) and Verge Gallery (NSW). Anna McMahon is supported by Parramatta Artists Studios.
Mathew McWilliams Mathew McWilliams is a Canadian artist living in Vancouver and Paris. McWilliams work has been shown internationally including exhibitions in Europe, The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Notable recent exhibitions include the group show 'Like-Minded' curated by the artist Micah Lexier at Plug In, Institute of Contemporary Art Winnipeg and 'Phantasmagoria' at Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. This was part three in a significant series of exhibitions about Vancouver Photography's notable history and its future. The previous two shows featured work by Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Mark Lewis, Ian Wallace and others. Phantasmagoria focuses on where photography is headed through the work of emerging artists originally from Vancouver. McWilliams is represented by Chalk Horse, Sydney.
Emily Sandrussi Emily Sandrussi is a Melbourne based photomedia artist. She is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Sydney College of the arts. In 2013 Emily completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class honours and the university medal, and was the inaugural recipient of the Artereal Gallery Mentorship Award for her work in the SCA Undergraduate Degree Show. In 2014 she was awarded the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award, and was a finalist in the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne and the prize for Contemporary Landscapes in Photography, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth. Sandrussi is represented by Artereal Gallery, Sydney.
Charlie Sofo Charlie Sofo is a Melbourne-based artist who has been exhibiting regularly since the mid-2000s. His work has been included in group exhibitions including New 12 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2012), Tell me tell me: Australian and Korean art 1976-2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney & National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (2011), and Unguided Tours, Anne Landa award for video and new media arts, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney (2011). His work is held in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Sofo is represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.
tensions/translations/transitions tensions/translations/transitions brings together the work of six artists employing physical and psychological markers and layers to evoke the tensions, translations and transitions occurring in our relationships with space and place. In bringing together these works perhaps new or unexpected tensions, translations or transitions will emerge. The topographies in Jon Cattapan’s renderings of urban space go beyond surface truths. During his time as an official Australian War Memorial artist in Timor Leste, Cattapan began to incorporate the use of night vision goggles into his practice. Masking his own eyes with the device, he is able to unmask scenes before him that would otherwise be virtually invisible. However this comes at the expense of other visual ‘truths’ such as depth and colour. Whether depicting a peacekeeping zone or the urban spaces that have long intrigued him, Cattapan’s paintings highlight the pathways and layers in between the spaces where humans and their systems operate. There is likewise a tension in the work of Janet Laurence between the hidden and revealed. In the Coral collapse series, water is simultaneously lens and veil to the reef beneath. Light refracts through its nebulous surface, distorting the view and creating a new, endlessly shifting visual truth. The reality of the urgency of the Great Barrier Reef’s fate is beneath the awareness of most – physically and metaphorically. Laurence’s images draw the viewer closer to it, conjuring a sense of looking through the water’s surface to clues beneath. The artist’s works highlight spaces of transience, liminality and convergence within Earth’s inescapably interconnected ecosystem.
Anna McMahon u+lises the natural world in a different way, to explore the tenuousness of belonging. Cut flowers and plants hover in the space between life and death, standing in for humans at our most vulnerable. McMahon harnesses those moments of tension which sit inbetween psychological states – of knowing and not knowing, belonging and not belonging – shaping them with gestures that, like such moments themselves, are simultaneously delicate and bold. Floral subjects are trapped by transparent yet impenetrable panes of glass, while brightlycoloured ar+ficial turf keeps on keeping on, mocking the wil+ng fronds. Mathew McWilliams’s Rubbings are contemporary transla+ons of classical texts, made as they were in a 14th century church in the Italian town of Rivodutri. Through McWilliams’s ac+ons the church’s frescoes have been re-energised, freed from their representa+onal constraints, abstracted as the ar+st’s crayon moves gently over the paper skin that separates it from its subject maNer. In other pieces, McWilliams pressed gently on the paper, embossing it with centuries of dirt (and the occasional piece of loose pigment) to produce the subtlest of traces. Thus the frescoes are proven to exist beyond the image, their spa+al protrusions captured and transported to the other side of the globe.
In her Domino Theory series, Emily Sandrussi works with photographs taken by her late stepfather during his Vietnam War service, the archive providing an entry point of understanding for the ar+st into untold experiences. By incorpora+ng mechanical and digital glitches into these images, Sandrussi highlights the spaces between individual experience and memory, and the transi+on of meaning between creator and viewer. These are not typical Vietnam War images, rather they translate the specific to the universal, evoking a sense of longing, their gaze directed towards the horizon and sky.
How does perception or meaning change when things are pushed beyond their supposedly fixed state? Charlie Sofo works with objects often taken for granted or ignored completely, exploring their potential and in doing so transitioning them into subjects. In the video Cracks, faults, fractures, the artist finds ruptures underfoot, and these become places for human bodies to pause rather than walk on, exploring the tensions that arise when the earth opens up to us. A series of Chocks are placed in a procession of pairs, permitted to hold their own rather than bear another burden – a release of tension or a functional rupture. Just as the title of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is translated variously as In search of lost time and Remembrance of things past, translation can lead to a transition of meaning. While there is a tension inherent in this, the masking of some truths is perhaps necessary for the revelation of others. Chloé Wolifson Many thanks to Dominik Mersch, Pamela Lee, Jon Cattapan, Janet Laurence, Anna McMahon, Mathew McWilliams, Emily Sandrussi, Charlie Sofo, Darren Knight, Georgia Hobbs, James Kerr, Rhianna Walcott, & David Emerson.
Jon Cattapan, ‘Eternity No 4’, 2014, oil on linen, 150 x 200 cm
Anna McMahon, ‘Untitled # 2’ from the series Being Found Out, 2016, Safety glass, Elephant ear leaf, dimensions variable
Jon Cattapan, ‘Continuing Underground II’, 2006-2013, oil on linen, 185 x 170 cm
Mathew McWilliams, ‘Relief (Rivodutri Grey)’, 2013, conte crayon rubbing, 110 x 80 cm, Courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney
Janet Laurence, ‘Coral Collapse 8 – Reef Resuscitation’, 2015, duraclear on acrylic box, 90 x 90 x 5 cm, edition of 3
Mathew McWilliams, ‘Relief (Rivodutri Green)’, 2013, conte crayon rubbing, 110 x 80 cm, Courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney
Janet Laurence, ‘Coral Collapse 6 – Reef Resuscitation’, 2015, duraclear on acrylic box, 90 x 90 x 5 cm, edition of 3
Mathew McWilliams, ‘Relief (Rivodutri uncoloured 1)’, 2013, hand embossing, dirt and pigment, 80 x 110 cm, Courtesy the artist and Chalk Horse, Sydney
Anna McMahon, ‘Untitled # 1’ from the series Being Found Out, 2016, Carpet, MDF, Elephant ear leaf, dimensions variable
Emily Sandrussi, ‘Domino Theory 2’, 2013, archival pigment print,104 x 104 cm, edition of 3, framed, Courtesy the artist and Artereal, Sydney
Emily Sandrussi, ‘Domino Theory 17’, 2013, archival pigment print, 53 x 53 cm, edition of 3, framed. Courtesy the artist and Artereal, Sydney
Charlie Sofo, ‘Chocks’, 2015, wood, stone, brick, concrete, dimensions variable, NFS Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Charlie Sofo, ‘Cracks, faults & fractures’, 2012, digital video, edition on 8, duration 1:09 mins, Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Charlie Sofo, ‘Shoes’, 2011-2013, wood, stone, glass, metal, dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney